The girl came up the causeway after dark, wading the last stretch through the Sallow’s shallows with a bundle held above her head in both arms. Idrin saw her first from the wall-walk. He had come up to watch the lantern on the Lessary Road, because the herald’s party had been expected since noon and had not come, and he had been standing at the parapet for ages with his scarred hand on the cold stone and his eyes on the dark ridge. Then he heard the water. It was a small, steady splash, and then a pause, and then another, and he looked down at the causeway’s foot and saw a figure in a grey reed-cutter’s skirt, wet to the thigh, coming up out of the river with the bundle held high.
She did not carry a torch. She walked the stones in the dark as if she could see them.
“Korrin,” said Idrin, not loudly.
Korrin was already on the stair. He came up onto the wall-walk with his bow across his back and his hand on its string, and stood beside Idrin, and looked down. He watched the girl for some time without speaking. Then he said, in his flat, short voice, “A marsh child. She has walked the causeway without a light. That means she knows where the stones are. Nobody learns the causeway in the dark unless someone has taught her, or unless she has nothing left to lose by falling in.”
“Which is it?” asked Idrin.
“I do not know,” said Korrin. “That is the trouble with it.”
Far off on the Lessary Road, a lantern moved once and went still. Idrin wondered whether the herald had finally come, or whether somebody else had been waiting in the dark for the same girl.
Harrow had come up behind them, quietly, the way he came up every stair. He had heard the splash too. He did not hurry. He stood at the parapet’s end with his hands behind his back and his cap pushed back on his head, and he counted the girl’s steps from the water’s edge to the gate, under his breath, in the flat rhythm he used for stones. When he had finished he said, very quietly, “Forty-one.”
“Forty-one,” said Korrin.
“From the river’s edge to the gate-step,” said Harrow. “She has walked the reach’s edge, I think, on the causeway side. She has walked it and come inside it. The Crown’s line is at the wall-foot. She has crossed the Crown’s line without asking, and she has crossed the reach, and she has come to the gate with the water still running off her, and she has not knocked.”
The girl stopped at the gate.
She stood on the bottom step of the causeway, a little below the level of the arch, with her bundle held against her chest and the river streaming from her skirt. She did not knock. She did not call out. She simply stood, with her chin up and her thin brown face turned toward the wall, and waited, the way the reeds wait for the wind to come round.
Idrin went down the stair.
He went alone, because Korrin stayed on the wall with his hand on his bow, and because he thought, in some part of himself he did not examine, that a Warden who came down to a child at a gate with a guard at his back was not a Warden anybody would trust. He opened the wicket with his own hand. The iron was cold. He stepped out onto the threshold, into the wet air off the river, and looked down at the girl on the step.
She was about twelve. She had a thin, sharp face, and eyes the colour of marsh-water in the dusk, and a strip of grey cloth tying back her hair. Her skirt had been patched and patched again, and her feet were bare on the stone, blue with cold. There was a reed-cutter’s knife at her belt in a sheath that had been stitched so many times it looked like a second belt. She showed no fear. She looked, Idrin thought, like someone who had made up her mind to be counted and did not intend to be sent away for a lack of manners.
“You are the Warden,” she said.
“I am the Warden,” said Idrin.
“Bardo Kell said you would be.”
“Bardo Kell is a marsh-man,” said Idrin, “and I am not sure he is always to be trusted with a name.”
The girl’s mouth twitched at one corner. It was not quite a smile. “Bardo Kell is not to be trusted with anything,” she said. “That is why he is the only one who ever tells the truth about the salt. My name is Wren. Of the Reed-Houses. The marsh has no houses now, the Crown has struck them from its roll, but my mother’s name is in the marsh’s own book, and I am the last line in it that is still open. I have come to be counted.”
“Counted by whom?” said Idrin.
“By the Hold,” said Wren. “The Hold keeps the only roll that still has my house on it. I have walked the causeway in the dark to find it. I did not think I should have to knock.”
“Why have you come now?” asked Idrin. He heard the question come out of him in the Lessary form, the statement that asked to be answered, and he tried to soften it and could not.
Wren considered him for a long moment. She held his gaze. She had a way of looking that was half a stare and half a challenge, but something more patient and more exact, as though she were weighing a sack of grain by holding it up in both hands.
“Bardo told me the Warden has been paying the marsh,” she said. “In salt and stone. Honest weight, and a fair share for the dead, and silver out of the Crown’s own toll. He said the Warden’s scales do not lie, and that the Warden’s Clerk writes every mark down, and that the Hold keeps its accounts in a book that nobody in Lessary can read.” She lifted her chin. “A Warden who pays is a Warden who counts. I have not been counted by anybody in twelve years. So I came to see what counting looks like, when it is done by a man who is not ashamed of it.”
Idrin did not know what to say. He opened his mouth and found, to his surprise, that he could speak at least this much, without any Writ at all. “Come in out of the river,” he said. “You are wet through, and the wind is off the marsh. The Hold will count you, Wren of the Reed-Houses. But it will count you in the gatehouse, by a lamp, with the Chamber present. It will not count you on a step.”
“Why not?”
“Because the step is not a place for a person to be entered,” said Idrin, “and I have been trying, for three months, to learn what the right places are.”
Wren looked at him for a moment longer. Then she nodded, once, the way a marsh-woman nods at a boat that has come in on time, and she stepped up over the threshold onto the Hold’s paving with her bare blue feet, and stopped inside the gate’s arch, under the stone. She looked up at it. The carved keystone was above her head, its worn inscription hidden in the shadow. She did not try to read it. She looked at the new courses on the north face, pale in the lamplight, and then down at the cobbles, and she counted them, quite openly, under her breath, in a voice Idrin had heard before, a low, flat rhythm that did not hurry.
Korrin, on the wall above, took his hand off the bowstring.
“She knows the count,” Harrow said softly, from the parapet, and it sounded almost like an apology.
The gatehouse was lit. Tallow had come down from the Hall with the minute-book under his arm and his pen behind his ear, and he set the book on the table without a word and opened it at a clean page. He did not offer the girl a chair. She did not ask for one. She stood by the gatehouse table with her bundle held in both arms, the river still dripping from the hem of her skirt onto the flags, and she waited, the way she had waited at the gate, while the lamp hissed and the Chamber’s voices came quietly through the open door.
Then she set the bundle down on the table, and began, carefully, to unwrap it.
She unfolded a square of oilcloth, stiff and yellow with age and creased in a dozen places, and inside it she had kept a sheet of reed-paper, folded in four. The paper was brown and rough and smelled of the marsh. It had a seal at its foot, a plain marsh seal of dark wax, cracked a little along one edge. And beside the seal, pressed into the paper’s fibres in a thumb-shaped blot that had dried to a brown so dark it was almost black, there was a mark of old blood.
“My mother’s thumb,” said Wren. She did not touch the mark. She only laid one finger, very lightly, on the paper beside it, and looked up at the Warden with her marsh-water eyes. “She pressed it on the day the house was struck. I was in her arms. I have carried it in my blood ever since, because the blood is the only copy of the charter that the Crown could never take from me.”